Renewing Literature Circles: Pedagogies for Curated Multimodal Responses

Abstract Contemporary students, accustomed to the agency and multimodality afforded by digital media in their out‐of‐school lives, require literature pedagogies that provide currency and appeal while furthering their understandings of literary techniques. Literature circles have long promoted student voice and choice but can lack criticality and attention to literary devices and fail to capitalize on the potential of digital technologies. The authors explore literature circle pedagogies designed to develop knowledge of literary theme and mood, highlighting multimodal responses foregrounding students’ identities. Two analytical lenses, curation and multimodality, underpin this investigation into the opportunities presented through pedagogical design. Curation, an expanded concept of text creation, is used to analyze opportunities for student displays of literary knowledge and identity through multimodal resources. Multimodal resources are understood as combinations of modes of meaning. Together, these analytical lenses offer insight into ways in which multimodal curation pedagogies enable students’ development of literary knowledge.